Approaches to Chinese Painting PART 1 Yang Xin Chinese painting can be traced back to decorations on pottery and on the floors of thatched huts in the Neo- lithic petiod, In the Eastern Zhou dynasty, 2,500 years ago, the use of brush and ink had already developed to such a point that the basic brush-made shapes have changed little since then, Chinese artists, philosophers, and ctities have constantly discussed the role and quali- ties of painting throughout its long and complex history. To this day, the work of most Chinese art historians reflects the distinctive interaction between the paint- ing tradition, on the one hand, and philosophy, poetry, calligraphy, and other cultural forms, on the other. What makes Chinese painting such an exquisite flower in the garden of Chinese civilization is the way the arts of the brush — painting, calligraphy, and poetry — together swith the related art of seal engraving, interact, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, in producing so many of the masterpieces. ‘A complex yet important distinction for Chinese scholars as they have examined their painting tradition is between the detailed and technically proficient represen- tation of a scene or object and the representation of its objective and subjective likeness. The former approach is associated largely with court painters, whose facility with the brush and whose naturalistic style culminated in many fine works, particularly during the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties; the latter approach is, Detail, figure 115 (gppasite) associated largely with the literati-artists whose works started to appear in significant numbers by the early Song, The contrast is not a total one. Still, the depiction of partly imagined likenesses, not strictly realistic ones, is at the heart of what most Chinese scholars see as distine- tive about the Chinese painting tradition. “One should learn ftom nature and paint the image in one’s mind,” as the painter Zhang Zao wrote in the eighth century: In the eatly periods in the development of Chinese painting, a prominent attistic goal was the realistic repre- sentation of the subject matter. Han Pei (280-253 8.C.), a thinker of the Warring States period, argued that the easiest subjects to paint were ghosts and devils; the most difficult, dogs, horses, and other real things. Why? Be- cause people are familiar with dogs and horses, but no- body has ever seen a ghost or a devil, so they will not know whether an exact likeness has been achieved. From the painted pottery of Neolithic times to the silk paint- ings of the Warring States (476~221 8.c.) and Western Han (206 .c.~A.p, 9) periods, there was a developing ‘matutity in style, with successive painters trying to create realistic likenesses in diverse ways. Murals in early tombs and in the Dunhuang caves, painted during the Tang dy- nasty, attest to their great accomplishments. In line with this approach, Xie He, an att critic and painter of the Southern Qi (479502), argued that there ate “six principles of painting,” one of which is “Fidelityto the object in portraying forms.”? Zhang Yanyuan, an art historian of the Tang dynasty, agreed. “The subject matter,” he said, “must be painted to its exact likeness.”* But other critics, even carly on, believed that paintings raced not — should not—be judged solely by a standard m, Good paintings, they said, achieve the unity of the objective and the subjective, showing both the image as it exists in reality and the image in the painter’s mind, Here we see the emergence of xiey, or “sketching the idea.” This, mote than realistic depiction, is what many critics have considered to be truly important in painting, Doi, “getting the idea” of the image in the artis’s mind, becomes the chief point to grasp when looking at a paint- ing, The viewer has to see beyond the image to the im- plied meaning, Only by “comprehending the idea,” or Juiyi, can one appreciate the best paintings in the Chinese art tradition, Artists taking this approach may highlight certain ar- cas and leave large areas blank, except for certain details related to the theme. ‘The spaces of various sizes and shapes form a pattern in themselves, drawing attention to the main subject matter while providing the viewer with room to imagine and wander in. Reality is implied, not necessarily rendered with scrupulous accutacy. A moon- lit scene outdoors and a lamplit scene indoors may be painted like the same seene in daylight, with only a ‘moon in the sky of a bright lamp to signal nighttime. In The Night Revels of Han Xizai, a sctoll painting by Gu Hongzhong of the Five Dynasties period (07-960), burning candles show that the scene is set at night (see fig. 103). Another example of this widespread approach to real- ity relates to the depiction of buildings. Chinese painters tend to present buildings as seen stzaight on of from slightly above, seldom as seen from below. Li Cheng, an- other artist of the Five Dynasties period, once tried to paint pavilions, pagodas, and other structures atop hills exactly as they appeared to him from below; that is, he did not paint the tiles on the roofs, just the woodwork and frame below the caves. His experiment was eviticized by Shen Kuo, a famous Song-dynasty scholar, who said that Li did not understand how to “perceive smallness from largeness.”* In succeeding dynasties no artist ever again took Li's approach. Neither Shen nor other Chinese erities have argued that such works distort ceality, however. The opposite is the case. Realistic copying can never show the innate ‘meaning or true nature of a subject, they would say. Only ‘with imaginative representation can the depths of reality of objective re 2 Approacest» Chineze Painting be depicted. By the end of the Tang dynasty inthe ten century, this approach to painting began to find its prene forms of expression Works executed by court painters into the tenth ean. tury before the establishment of the Song dynasty promi, nently featured human figures, the use of lines to defing forms, rich and vatied coloring, and realistic representa, tion of the subject matter. This approach fit well with the social and cultural functions that the paintings were de. signed to fulfill. During the Qin (221-206 3.c.) and Hag (206 8.c.-A.p. 220) dynasties, for example, the govern. ‘ment used portraits to publicize and eulogize loyal minis. tets and martyrs and to denounce traitors. Later Xie He even remarked, “All paintings stand for poetic justice lessons about the rise and fall of ministers over the course of one thousand years can be drawn from paintings."5 Scholars and officials of the Tang dynasty went a sep farther and attempted to bring painting into line with Confucian ideology. In Lidai minghua ji (Record of fa- ‘mous paintings of successive dynasties), Zhang Yanyuan argued that the “art of painting exists to enlighten ethics, improve human relationships, divine the changes of na- ture, and explore hidden truths. Tt functions like the Six [Confucian] Classics and works regardless of the chang- ing seasons.” The cataloguer of the court collection of paintings entitled Xvanbe bugpx, compiled at the end of the Northern Song (960~1127), attempted to define che social function of figure painting, even arguing that land- scape painting, bird-and-flower painting, and animal painting should fulfill a similar ethical function. In the Xuanbe huapu, paintings were divided into tea ‘categories according to subject: religious themes, figures palace buildings, foreign people, dragons and fish, land- scapes, animals, birds and flowers, bamboo, and ves tables and fruit. These categories carefully reflected the official Confucian value system of the time. Landscape paintings, for example, were prized for their portrayal oF the Five Sacred Mountains and the Pout Great Rivers — places of imperial significance. The merit of birds and fowers initially lay in their “metaphorical and allegorical meaning,” while that of vegetables and fruit lay in thelr use “as sacrifices to deities.” In short, paintings WF judged largely in terms of how well their subject matter served the gods, the Budd, sages, and emperors “The compiler of the Xnanbe buapu certainly knew that birds and bamboo were not directly connected #0 humst affairs, but they had to be made metaphorically relevant if they were to symbolize moral and ethical values. This pine trces, bamboo, plum blossoms, chrysanthemum’ anil, egrets, geese, and ducks became symbols of herm'®or men of noble character; peonies and peacocks became symbols of wealth and rank; willow trees, symbols of ‘amorous sentiments; and tall pine trees and ancient cy- presses, symbols of constancy and uprightness. In this way, bitd-and-flower paintings could serve an instruc tional purpose. By the end of the Tang and during the Five Dynasties, before the Xuanbe Augpu was written, landscape painting and bird-and-flower painting on silk achieved maturity, in the process changing the traditional, simplistic use of sketched lines to define forms. As landscapes came t0 convey tranquillity or poetic melancholy and refinement, the tendency to use less color or even just water and ink became prevalent. Painters also increasingly used scrolls asa medium. In art circles in China itis believed that Wu Daozi (ac- tive ca, 710-760) marked the peak of court painting. Un- fortunately, none of his works have survived, but some ‘copies are said to be based on his original drawings (see fig. 68). ‘A couple of centuries later, in the Northern Song pe- tod, came the tise of the literatus-artist, whose influence on the development of Chinese painting was formidable. ‘The literati-artists were well trained in poetry and callig- raphy. Partly to distinguish themselves from professional, painters, they often looked at painting in terms of those arts, adopting many of the aesthetic conceptions set, forth in Ershisi chipin (The twenty-four aspects of poetry) by Sikong Tu of the Tang dynasty, a milestone in the history of poetry criticism. To elucidate such notions as vigor, thinness, primitive simplicity, elegance, nataral- ness, and implicitness, Sikong Tu desctibed aatural set- tings appropriate to each. Elegance, for instance, could be expressed by depicting scenes with “gentlemen listen ing to the falling sain in a thatched cottage while drinking, from a jade pot; seated gentlemen flanked by tall bamboo groves; or floating white clouds and a few birds chasing each other in a sky clearing after rain.”* ‘Another theory of poetry that proved highly influen- tial among literati-painters and art crities was set forth by Mei Yaochen, a Song poet who sought to achieve “depth. and primitive simplicity” in his works. Once he remarked that poems “must be able to portray hard-to-catch scenes as if they leap up before the eyes, and imply meaning be- tween the lines. A masterpiece is superior even to this.” By “meaning between the lines” he referred to something the author had in mind and the reader could perceive only by intuition, that is, a meaning that could be appre- hended but not expressed. The literati-artists saw the ap- plicability of this idea to painting: Another aspect of the shift from court painting to literati painting was the growing emphasis on painting as, an enjoyable activity, intended to please oneself and one’s friends. Su Shi, a poet, calligeapher, and painter of the Song dynasty, was one advocate of enjoyment. He once wrote a poem to a friend that read: “T asked why you painted a portrait of me; you said you are a portraitist to amuse yourself.” Ni Zan, one of the Four Great Masters of Yuan-dynasty painting, suggested that the pursuit of enjoyment gained in importance as the search for the “exact likeness” grew more desultory. This view was car- ried forward by Dong Qichang, the great painter and art historian of the late Ming dynasty, who explicitly advo- cated “painting for fun” and “the painting of fun.” ‘Throughout the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644), and Qing (1644—19'1) dynasties, particulatly toward the lose of each, when government power waned and cotruption grew rife, the idea of using paintings to “en- lighten ethics and improve human relationships” was seldom mentioned by Literati-artists. ‘Thic practice of annotating a painting with a poem evi- dently originated among the literati of the Song petiod. ‘The Tang poet Du Fu composed many pocms about paintings, some of which were comments on specific works. Whether any of his poems were written directly on wall paintings or scrolls is unknown. A number of Song poets composed poems about paintings, however, aad some of these are found written on the mountings of handscrolls. ‘The earliest known pieces extant today are attributed to Emperor Huizong (¢. 1o1—r125), a cele- bated painter in his own right (ee, for instance, fig. 113); among these is the earliest existing example of a painting inscribed with a poem composed by the artist himself. Later paintets followed suit; the practice became popular during the Yuan dynasty and common during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when paintings were likely to bear poetry of other inscriptions. ‘That Chinese characters developed from pictographs led to a belief that painting and calligraphy had a common origin. Recent archaeological findings have es- tablished that in fact painting appeared before the inven- tion of script. It remains trac, however, that there is a close connection between calligraphy and painting: both involve brushwork, and inscribing a painting requires knowing how to write beautiful script. Over time, literati, who were well versed in calligraphy, employed in their paintings brushwork techniques af- fected by their calligraphic style, and came to see the form and content of the inscription as an integral part of the painting. Drawn to the att of calligraphy, they began Adproactes Chines Paintingto pay close attention in painting to the aesthetic appeal of lines and to the distinctive ways of doing brushwork, instead of just employing lines to compose forms. Xie He, in his Six Principles of painting, introduced terms to evaluate brushwork. In the Yuan dynasty, Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322) inscribed a poem on a painting of rocks and ‘bamboo that concluded with the statement that calligea- phy and painting are identical (see fig. 173). Later artists did not take this view but instead cultivated a distinctive personal calligraphic style that was naturally reflected in their paintings. Shen Zhou (1427-1509), for example, ‘who modeled his calligraphy on Huang Tingjian’s, exe~ cuted paintings with the bold and vigorous brushstrokes characteristic of Huang’s script (ee fig. 203). Others whose painting style shows similarities with their calli- graphic style are Wen Zhengming (1470~1559), Zhao Zhigian (1829-1884), and Wu Changshuo (1844~1927) (Gee figs. 204, 282, 284). ‘The inscription on a painting accentuates and comple- ‘ments the image. In the Song and Yuan periods, paint- ings were usually inscribed after completion to fill up any remaining space, but in the Ming and Qing periods, placement of the insctiption was considered when an artist planned the initial composition. In some works the inscribed poem is essential to creating the perfect visual effect. In Bamboo and Rock by Zheng Xie (16531766), for example, the gray lines and gradations of the calligraphy look like the contour lines of the rock (see fig. 262). In Fish Svinming by Li Fangying (1695-1755), the poem ‘hangs vertically like a riverbank. Seals, which typically imprint characters engraved in an ancient calligraphic style, likewise enhance a painting, ‘The practice of affixing seals possibly originated with collectors who stamped their seals on collections to des- ‘gnate ownership. According to the Xuanhe buapu, paint- Tes SRecue before the Tang dynasty were nor stamped, by haan mpsee Taizong inaugurated the practice Ind Dc eran eng am ai uring he Noxthern Song, painters began to works, often to guard against forgery. Using seals, however practical, added aesthe to the paintings, as lterat-painters telzed. The eg stamp could enliven a picture otherwise dallin colo agy the choice of seal indicated certain interest and values op the painter, often with subtle cultural, personal, or pli, cal implications. Qian Xuan (ca. 1235—befote 1307), fy example, had a seal that read “brush and ink game? inn plying that his paintings were for self-amusement, Mos, painters had their seals carved or cast by artisans, by some made their own, ‘The incorporation of seals into pictures made Chinese painting into a comprehensive art that combines several others. A painting is often the joint product ofa painter, a poet, a calligrapher, and a seal maker. In exceptional cases, as with Wu Changshuo and Qi Baishi (1864-1957, the painters are well versed in all these arts themselves (Gee, for example, fig. 292). This bringing together of so ‘many art forms ultimately became the most characteristic feature of Chinese painting and the reason why so many works resonate with the culture and civilization of China Just as Chinese paintings are enriched by the manifold skills and vision of several artists, this book, 100, is the product of several minds, but in this case the contriba- tors come from varying cultural backgrounds. Readers are thus introduced here to a greater diversity of view- points and methods than they would receive from aay single author. Although scholars inside and outside China working in many fields have learned a great deal from each other’s approaches, their differences can be of great Value in stimulating discussion, raising new questions, and offering vatious ways to explore the same topic. In preparing the manuscript for this book, all of us authors contributed points of view. At the same time, through ‘meetings and reviews of each other's work, we shaped our chapters to provide continuity and consistency in the book as a whole. The intensive collaboration was an & timable development in China-US. cultural and scholatly exchanges, but our goal was to provide an understand ing of the historical evolution of Chinese painting, along with a bouquet of exquisite paintings to enjoy. iC appealApproaches to Chinese Painting PART 11 James Cahill ‘The awesome antiquity and continuity of Chinese civi- lization, and the unmatched fullness of its written record, are generally recognized, and its painting tradition is of a corresponding magnitude. It is the only tradition in world art that can rival the European painting tradition in the sheer quantity and diversity of its output, the number of recorded artists of note, and the complexity of aes- thetic issues attached to it, as well as the sophistication of, the written literature that accompanies it through the centuries. All this richness and diversity, however, may not be immediately apparent to a newcomer who walks unprepared through the Chinese painting galleries of even a major museum with an excellent collection. I can recall the experience of emerging from a great loan exhi- bition of European oil paintings at the Metropolitan ‘Museum of Art to enter its Chinese painting galleries and being shocked at how small and flat and hard to pene- trate the Chinese pictures suddenly appeared, even to someone like myself who knew them well. "The truth is that Chinese painting, though not a con- noisseur’s art, does not, on the whole, present its imagery with the same forcefulness and immediacy as European paintings typically do. In part, this is a matter of immer- sion: an unfamiliar artis always likely to be difficult of ac- cess at first. I have sometimes recalled, in thinking about this problem, the experience of taking a noted Chinese artist and connoisseur who had recently arrived in the United States through the European painting galleries of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., from Italian primitives to Picasso, and hearing him complain that the paintings all looked more or less alike, besides not exhibiting much variety in their brushwork. A book like the present one aims, among other things, at carry- ing its careful readers beyond that stage with Chinese paintings, sensitizing them to qualities that may not be apparent to casual viewers but that differentiate the ‘paintings strongly, so that they no longer “all look alike.” But viewers may also find it necessary to adjust their expectations and their vision, as one would in going from a concert hall in which a Beethoven symphony is being performed to a smaller room where a string quartet is playing Mozart. Even after we have made allowances for: ‘ventions of representation, we must grant that Chinese painting techniques involve much less of the illusionistic, of giving the viewer a sense of looking through a window (the picture frame) into a space coextensive with the viewer's, The artists do not attempt to locate the viewer firmly through any such device as single-point perspec- tive of, as is typical of many European painters, to render three-dimensional forms volumetrically on the flat sus- face through shading and indications of a consistent light, source, Chinese paintings are much more likely to read primarily as configurations of brushstrokes on the pic- ture plane, without much opening back into depth. But the same can be said of most of the best twentieth-century Western paintings—or perhaps it would be truer to say that in both, calculated tensions between surface and depth and between image and abstraction are what engage the viewer's vision most powerfully. If Chinese paintings seemed technically inept to Western viewers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuties because of their failings in illusionism, they can look all the more modern, tous now. But that approach has its pitfalls, too. To those more seriously engaged with Chinese culture, seeing Chinese paintings as modem can seem a matter of trivializing them, ignoring their original meanings. To appreciate the paintings completely, they would argue, demands a lot of special knowledge and acquired visual skills. ‘This is true, ‘0 far as it goes; and to list all the kinds of knowledge and skills demanded would surely discourage any neophyte enthusiast from addressing the subject at all. Chinese artists, to be sure, love to hark back to earlier painting in their styles, appealing to the knowing viewer with learned allusions, like the stylistic echoes of the past in poetry by Pound and Eliot or in some paintings by Picasso. They can call on an assumed mastery in their cultivated audi- ence of an extensive store of esoteric references to their history and literature, as well as to the doctrines of Con- facianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Those of us who write about Chinese painting, including the six authors of this book, try to fill in these allusions and teferences as best we can for the paintings we discuss; but it is some- times like explaining a pun or a joke—the discussion turns academic and bogs down. What saves this situation is the capacity of Chinese paintings to appeal on various levels, including the more or less intuitive and purely aes- thetic, Responses on this level are by no means trivial, not are they simply an opening wedge to what lies be- yond; they can be as intense and as true to the artist's deepest purpose as anything that art affords. We special- ists have become accustomed to hearing from people ‘with no special background in Chinese culture who find, nonetheless, that a serious engagement with Chinese paintings has changed their lives. On the matter of the traditionalism of Chinese paint ing, itis important not to take too literally the claims of Chinese artists that they are imitating the past—a claim that had the function of legitimizing their practice in the ees of their original audiences, Nor should we slip, as, even the best Western critics and theorists have some- ee Gee Combsehs more recently, Arthur Be a pe EE speck Coe in bation feel ae Se ia. ying out of varia- 5 fiering from another & Approacte fo Chinese Painting much the way one interpretation of a piano piece differs from another. The truth is that an “imitation” can be very free, to the point where its relation to the claimed model is hard to discern; the creativity of the artist isin no sense compromised. The great late-Ming landseapist Dong Qichang, for instance, if one only reads his pronounce. ments, could be misunderstood to be a conservative and derivative master; in fact, he was a revolutionary, as inno- vative as Cézanne or Picasso, and as complex and freely manipulative in his uses of the past. It is true enough, on the other hand, that studying and copying old masters ‘was essential 10 @ Chinese artist’s early development — some reached middle age before they emerged from this imitative stage to establish theit own schools. ‘That Chinese paintings were not intended to be read illusionistically as windows into another space is empha- sized by the artists themselves in their practice of writing inscriptions prominently on them, as well as by contem- porary and later litterateurs who also insctibed poems and wotds of appreciation on the works themselves and by later collectors who impressed their seals on them in red. The seals and inscriptions can be a distraction fora viewer unaccustomed to the presence of such extraneous markings on a painting, for they tend to hold the atten- tion on the surface instead of allowing it to be drawa into the picture. The Chinese seem able to tune out the mark- ings, much as theatergoers can become oblivious to the proscenium arch and the surrounding audience when watching a play. One adjusts quickly to the conventions of any art, For Chinese connoisseurs, in fact, seals and in- sctiptions provide added dimensions and depths to the experience of viewing a painting. ‘The-artist’s own inscription can be a poem, of a prose account of the circumstances under which the work was done, or some combination of these; it often ‘includes a dedication to some designated recipient and a date sometimes with a note on what old master is being “imi- tated.” Informative and literary inscriptions of this kind are more often written by literati or scholar-amateut masters on their works; there are ordinarily shortet art ists inscriptions, sometimes only signatures and seals, 0% paintings by professionals. Longer inscriptions, if writes in an clegant script, can demonstrate the cultivated art is’s accomplishments in the so-called Three Perfections: poetry, calligraphy, and painting. These, again, are usually the prerogative of the literati. When the painting is 9° companied by, of inscribed with, a series of poems by the painter's contemporaries, we can usually assume that it ‘was team-produced as a composite work according © * preset program for presentation to a particular recipien®perhaps on a birthday ot some other auspicious occasion. When the later inscriptions are prose appreciations of the painting, on the other hand, they are often mounted apart from it—above or below it in a hanging scroll or follow- ing it in a handscroll—and are known as colophons. Seals are blocks or sculpted pieces of (usually) soft stone with the text —the user's name or studio name ora motto—carved in archaic characters (seal seript) into fone flatcened end, either in relief or in intagtio. The seal stone is patted on a fibrous pad inked with vermilion pig- ment in an oil base, and then impressed onto the surface of the painting. Seal impressions on paintings, if not the artist’s, ordinarily record ownership, and by identifying them, the knowledgeable viewer can ascertain which col- lections the painting has passed through. If these are well, known and distinguished (and judged to be genuine— seals are widely counterfeited), the value of the work is correspondingly enhanced. On old and famous paintings, seal impressions often seem to crowd the imagery of the picture. Collectors of good taste kept theis seals small and, confined their use to the corners; arrogant collectors and emperors impressed large, showy seals in all the available spaces. All these together, poems and colophons and artists’ inscriptions and seals, can make the fall apprecia- tion of 2 Chinese painting, for the cognoscenti, a very rich and complex procedure, much more than simply en- joying it as a picture or admiring the artist’s skill. Since the traditional Chinese critics who wrote the notes of appreciation and the theoretical texts were themselves literati, moze or less by definition, and since virtually all of them practiced calligraphy, we should sec- ‘ognize their understandable bias in favor of literati paint ing, their emphasis on brushwork and other features that painting shares with calligraphy (they love to tell us, quite ‘misleadingly, that painting and calligraphy are a single art), their disdain for “form-likeness” and technical skills that can be learned instead of being innate or being produced by Confucian self-cultivation, We Western spe- Cialists have frequently echoed these literati-biased views, consciously or unconsciously, failing to sce how incom- patible they are with our own quite justified admiration for the achievements of the great professional and acad- emy masters of the Song period and later—achieve- ‘ments that depend on exactly the painterly techniques and breathtaking representational skills dismissed so lightly by the Chinese literati. Both Chinese and foreign specialists today are trying to reach more balanced judg- ‘ments of the different kinds and modes of Chinese paint- ing— professional or amateur, technically proficient or rough and spontaneous. ‘The distinction between the professional artists, for whom painting was a vocation and livelihood, and the cultivated amateurs who in theory painted as a leisure- time activity with no thought of profit, giving their works away freely to friends, is basic to Chinese discussions of painting and reflects, however overneatly, a social and economic reality. All our attempts to blur it or ignore it do not make it go away. Much study has been done in re- cent years on this aspect of Chinese painting, and inter- ested readers can find some of it conveniently assembled in the collection of essays Artists and Patrons (1991), edited by Chu-tsing Li and others, or my own book The Painter's Practice (1994—see Further Readings for both). ‘The class of learned Chinese known as literati (venren) re- ceived a Confucian education in the Classics and were ex- pected to at least attempt the state examinations that led to bureaucratic carcers as officials, careers that would en- rich and empower themselves and their families. But cit- cumstances often prevented the realization of this ideal: failure in the examinations, disinclination to serve under fan alien regime (as in the Mongol Yuan dynasty), and, especially for the later periods when education became more widespread, a huge oversupply of educated and ualified would-be officeholders, far more than the civil service could absorb. Failed would-be officials, if they could not rely on family wealth and landholdings, had to make their living in other ways, as teachers, as pro- fessional writers, as doctors, diviners, scribes, or artists. ‘Those among them who became painters thus found themselves outside the traditional amateur-professional ppactern and had to create new social roles for themselves. For the straightforward professional attists, in con- teast—those who made this choice or had it thrust upon them while young, without ever receiving a classical edu- cation or seriously aspiring to official rank— opportuni- ties were more limited. ‘They were trained through an apprenticeship, typically in the atelier of some local master, and until they distinguished themselves and ttan- scended that status through their individual achieve- ments, were regarded as “artisan-painters,” not unlike lacquer workers or makers of furniture. If they attained extraordinary recognition and acclaim in their native places, they might be recommended to the court by some official or minister from the same district and enter the Imperial Painting Academy (the term is used loosely to designate groups of artists active at court), which was staffed in this way by painters from vatious locales. Short of achieving court status, professionals sought patronage from the affluent elite in the cities, producing paintings ‘on commission or ready-mades for sale from the studio, Approaches to Chinese Paintingusually with seasonal and auspicious themes, to fill the needs of special occasions or simply to hang as decora- tive works. Another of the literati’s prejudices was against func- tionalism. Just as they themselves were generalists in their official careers, receiving little specialist training in administrative practice, they placed the highest value on works of art that, in their view, rose above the merely functional. The paintings they themselves pro- duced were far narrower in theme than the repertoires expected of capable professionals and included ink monochrome paintings of bamboo, orchids, blossoming plum branches, old trees, and other plant subjects, for which the technical demands of representation were rela~ tively modest and easily within grasp for people who had already mastered the use of brush and ink through prac- ticing calligeaphy. These subjects all carried symbolic meanings, signifying especially the virtues attributed to the scholar-gentleman: bamboo stood for uprightness, simplicity, and “hollow-heartedness,” that is, freedom from desires that muddled one’s consciousness; the Chi- nese orchid (Janbua), which grows in secluded places and spreads a subtle fragrance, stood for modesty and some- times for the scholar-official neglected or undervalued by his ruler; the pine and other evergreen trees stood for steadfastness in adversity, and so forth. Accordingly, paintings of these subjects were ideal as small gifts for fellow literati, often carrying messages that pertained to the recipient's situation. They were given by artists as gifts in an intricate and very Chinese system of receiving and repaying favors o currying favor from superiors —a system that somewhat belies the literati insistence on the high-minded, disinterested creation of paintings. Besides plants, the literati artists favored landscapes that similarly did not impose the requirement of long stu- dio training on the painter. As done by the literati, land~ scape paintings tended to be “pute,” without narrative themes of prominent and distinctive figural subjects Such figures and houses as wete represented were of a highly conventional character. In these paintings the viewer was expected to admire the brushwork, the “touch” of the individual artist, which was taken to ex- press his personality and cultivation; sophisticated allu- sions to the styles of old masters, meant to signify the upper-class status of both artist and viewer, for com- OF cote 4ee 0 antique paintings; and a depsee ae ional inventiveness, which reseued_ from Ni Zan ig i spetitveness the oewures of att like Ming which vs en petiod and Dong Qichang in the late ‘might otherwise be said to consist largely of © Ate to Chines Pang the same scene (a river landscape with tzces and distan, hills) painted over and over again. Landscape painting of this kind, however, was a lteg and special phenomenon; in the great tradition of the carly petiods landscape painting in China was a very dig ferent art, produced under very different premises ang conditions. Landscape as a subject in itself, not just a set. ting or context for human activities or a background tp religious images and the like, begins its rise as a separate genre around the ninth century and reaches what most would consider the height of its development in the Five Dynasties and Song periods, in the tenth to thitteenth centuries, While other subject categories, such as Bud. Ghist and Daoist paintings, secular figure painting, and bitd-and-Aower and animal paintings continued to be produced on a high level by specialist artists and by the versatile professionals, landscape dominated the critical discussions, ignited the passions of collectors, and ab- sorbed the creative energies of most of the best artist from that time on. The creation of the monumental land- scape mode in the Five Dynasties and Northern Song pe- riods in the hands of a succession of great masters and ts transformation into a quieter, more lyrical imagery in the Southern Song, especially within the court academy, ate dealt with in the chapter on those periods in this book. Some writers on the early history of Chinese landscape painting like to locate its origins within particular reli gious and philosophical systems, especially Buddhist and Daoist, and suggest that the mountains appearing in easly paintings are, on the deepest level, sacred mountains. While many of them doubtless are, writers taking @ soberer view, truer to the surviving materials, see early landscape imagery in China as polysemous and diverseia, its roots. Trees and rocks in early pictorial art indicate an outdoor location; more tightly organized landscape settings are developed later for historical and legendary narratives. In all these paintings, scenes that might be termed Confucian, moralistic and secular, are found at least as commonly as those with Buddhist or Daoist themes. The truth is that landscape imagery in China, from beginning to end, is an open signifier into which # diversity of meanings can be fitted, with appropriate al- erations and additions, often including inscriptions that clatify the particular purpose to which the nature image‘} is being put on this particular occasion. Sweeping claim’ about the nature and origin of Chinese landscape re? sentations, then, can be of only limited application with regard to actual works of art. The basic media of Chinese painting are brush, il pigments, and a ground, usually silk or paper. (The exelent book by Jerome Silbergeld titled Chinere Painting Sile [1982] gives a full account of these aspects of the art and is strongly recommended to any reader who wants to know more) Chinese ink takes the form of solid cakes, made by mixing soot with glue and pressing the mixture into a mold. ‘The soot comes from burning either wood, especially pine wood, or oil and must be refined to re- move impurities, leaving only a fine carbon dust. The ink. cake is rubbed with a litde water on a specially chosen and shaped inkstone, which can be either stone or ce- ramic, to produce the ink for writing and painting. ‘The pigments are similarly made from powdered mineral or plant substances in a glue base. The Chinese brush is ‘composed of carefully selected animal hairs formed into a conical clump and fixed into the end of a bamboo tube; the outer hairs are softer, since they hold the ink or pig ment, and the center ones stiffer, to give resilience to the tip. The papers used for painting and calligraphy are made from a vatiety of fibers (not, as myth has it, from tice) and, on the whole, combine the virtues of toughness, and lustrousness with a capacity to age without much dis- coloration, especially if the scroll is kept rolled up most of the time and not exposed to air and dust. Silk, when the artist paints on it, is the buff or ivory tone of raw sil today; with the passage of time and exposure it darkens, often to the point of making the image difficult to dis- cern. Both silk and paper ate usually sized with an alum mixture to make their surfaces less absorbent, so that the {nk will not soak into them and diffuse to blur the brush- stroke. “The special qualities of the Chinese artists’ tools and ‘materials have @ lot to do with painting style. The reser voit in the brush can hold enough ink to allow the draw- ing of long, continuous lines, which since the tip is so fine and the brush is held perpendicular to the surface, can move in any direction without altering in breadth. ‘The artist can also choose, however, to use a line that fluctuates in breadth, thickening when the brush is pressed down, thinning when it is raised. A boundless repertory of special brushstrokes can be achieved by varying the angle of brush to paper and the ways the brush is inked and moved, applied and raised; a single stroke can be made to render a bamboo leaf or a section of bamboo stalk, and at the hands of a master, a few seemingly casual strokes can produce a strikingly vivid image of an old tree or a bird. Especially in the later peri- ods, when the attention of both artists and viewers is of- ten directed more toward the hand of the artist, the facture of the work, than toward its imagery, the distinction be- ‘eveen “dry” and “wet” brushwork becomes important. Dry brushwork is done by loading the brush lightly with ink that has partly dried on the inkstone and applying it with a light touch, usually to paper (because of its tex- tured surface), for an effect that can be like charcoal or pencil drawing, For wet brushwork, the brush is loaded more heavily with liquid ink and applied so that the indi- vidual strokes, traces of the movement of the brush, can be obliterated. Silk is more suited to finer styles and to heavily colored painting, since the mineral pigments ad- here better to its surface, and repeatedly rolling up the scroll is less likely to make the paint flake off. Accord- ingly, the masterworks of academy and professional painters are more likely to be on silk, and the creations of the literati masters on paper. “The otiginal style of Chinese painting, seen in the caslicst examples that survive, combines fine-line de- lineation of forms—with an emphasis on contours but also some interior drawing—with washes of color. ‘This outline-and-color mode persists through the ‘Tang dynasty after which it slips into a conservative and some- times archaistic status, while the most innovative ten- dencies in painting are developing in other directions, ‘Around the tenth century, artists began to develop sys- tems of repeated brushstrokes that render texture and tactile surfaces. In landscape painting, the cnn, ot texture strokes (literally, “weinkles”), define geologically the vari- ous rocky and earthy masses in landscape imagery; in bisd-and-animal painting, fine strokes are patiently ap- plied to differentiate the special plumages of birds and far of animals. Uneven applications of such strokes also serve asa kind of shading to give an effect of convexity to the forms. Accompanying this shift—in fact, inseparable from itis a shift from the colorful styles either to the ink monochrome mode or to ink painting with only light ‘washes of warm and cool colors, Here, again, the Chinese ctitics and theorists formulate a rhetoric about the su- periority of ink monochrome to colorful painting, just as they do for the purported superiority of tough, spon- taneous, amateurish styles to the technically finished. These arguments tend to take on a moralistic tone: color- ful painting is intended to please the eye and increase the attractiveness of the work and is thus meretricious; ink, monochrome reveals the inner structure of the thing de- picted instead of only the outer appearance, and so forth. ‘The formulations owe more to ready-made rhetorical po- sitions than to observation and evaluation of the paint- ings. Meanwhile, the artists made their choices (as always) according to what suited their representational and ex: pressive purposes, with litte regard, we can assume, for Approaches to Chinese Paintingthose grand theoretical pronouncements in which light ‘and dark in painting are equated with the cosmological forces of yin and yang, or the rough-brush styles are seen as direct manifestations of a Chan (Zen) mode of experi- cencing the world—even though, like artists today, they may well have repeated these when asked about what they were up to. = We know from texts and from some surviving ex- amples, mostly fragmentary, that large compositions in the form of wall and screen paintings were favored in the early stages of the art. The forms with which we are most familiar in recent times, the hanging scroll and hand- scroll, appear only in later centuries, along with album leaves and small paintings of a distinctive shape made to be mounted on flat fans. Early screens, which are de- picted in many old pictures, are mostly of the standing, horizontally rectangular kind, with the painting done ona single surface; but the screen made up of a series of tall, vertical panels usually forming a continuous composi- tion, like the Japanese folding screen that derived from it, is also of early origin in China. The folding fan, by con~ trast, originated in Japan and appears in Chinese painting only from the fifteenth century. ‘The hanging scroll is meant to be hung on the wall and viewed all at once and can remain on display for extended periods, simply as decoration or as a seasonal and auspi- cious exhibit. The handscroll, by conteast, is opened — unrolled —only when someone means to view it and is rolled up again afterward, much as a book is opened, read, and closed. It takes the form of a long, horizontal roll, usually consisting of a succession of pieces of sill: and paper bearing passages of calligraphy and painting, all joined together by paste and a continuous paper back- ing. One views it at arm’s length on a table, holding the stil-unseen rolled-up part in the left hand, pulling it out and rerolling with the right hand, so that the writing and Painting move rightward beneath one’s gaze, and one sees only what will fit between one’s extended hands, wherever one chooses to stop. A handscroll is obviously so Mal Yehicle for a long text, since Chinese writing is ‘one in vertical columns read from right to left, and it Probably originated as that, In painting, it is especially suited to illustrated texts, in which writing and picture al- ternate; te ie to narratives, in which successive scenes of the story appear as one untolls in which the viewer takes continuous terrain, ‘The seroll form imy conventions on the point—a single, and to landscape panoramas, an imaginary journey through a iposes certain spatial and other artist, such as the moving vantage located viewpoint cannot be sustained 1° Atha Chinese Painting over the whole length. Because the pictorial materia in handscroll are seen over a stretch of time and in an ord, dictated by the artist, temporal sequence can be joined tg spatial extension in ways that cannot be matched in Wes, cern easel painting, Because the experience of viewing » Chinese handscroll takes place over a demarcated stretch of time, it has frequently been likened to listening ty a piece of music of seeing a film; but since neither of these —at least until the advent of technology that dis. torts their character —accords the listener or viewer the options of pausing, speeding, or slowing, or going back. ward and forward at will, a better analogy is probably with reading a long poem. Long handscrolls present problems for exhibition in museums, because the otiginal and proper way of seeing them cannot easily be repro- duced there, and they are usually shown full-length or swith as much exposed as will fit into a case. The same ptoblem arises in publications like this one, where repro- ducing the entire work as a narrow horizontal sttip across the page means that each section is postage-stamp size, Reproducing only a postion of the composition, lage enough for details and brushwork to be 1ead, is ordinasly the best compromise, for the episodic nature of most handscroll compositions allows a part to stand effectively for the whole. As T noted at the beginning of this chapter, the huge surviving corpus of Chinese paintings is accompanied by a correspondingly abundant and sophisticated critical, theoretical, and art-historical literature, which, if it were better known, would be envied by specialists in Western art. (For the periods through the fourteenth century, itis conveniently and excellently excerpted and discussed ia Early Chinese Texts on Painting, compiled and edited by Susan Bush and Hsio-yen Shih [1985].) ‘These Chinese texts, properly interpreted, can take us a long way toward understanding and appreciating Chinese paintings 9 something like the way their original andiences did. At the same time, they do not answer all our questions, if only because the questions they implicitly pose and 4° dress are not the same as ours. Chinese writers on pat ing, then and now, concentrate on the individual mastet his (seldom het) biography, his place in large stylist lineages and other groupings, and the particular chart” teristics and strengths of his works. Books that can be considered general histoties of painting were composed from the ninth century through the twelfth but after that gave way to collections that provided information and opinions on individual painters and were organi around such lists, Larger issues continue to be discussed, often vehmently; but to chart these in detail it is necessary to draw together the contending voices from many written sources — collected literary works, miscellanies, and colo- phons still attached to paintings or recorded elsewhere. No single Ming or Qing writer or book even attempts to ‘comprehend them all or to present the different view- points fairly. Together, however, they provide us with clues to the controversies that increasingly characterized discussions of paintings in the later centuries, reflect- ing the regional, sociocconomic, stylistic, and other alle- giances of the artists and writers. (The opening of my book The Distant Mountains [1982], pp. 3-30, outlines these controversies for the late Ming period.) Any partic ular writer states his argument as self-evident and un- shakable, so it is only when they are brought together that the dynamic pattern of tensions between opposing, views and factions emerges. Chinese scholars today, pur- suing the “harmonizing mode” that is traditionally valued in their culture, are inclined to play down the tensions; Western scholars, seeing these as productive of a lively interplay of ideas, tend to bring them to the fore. Chinese writers on painting construct stylistic lineages into which artists and paintings are recognized to fit; a good connoisseur, along with judging authenticity, will typically identify a painting as “in the style of” a certain old master or declare the artist to have been so-and-so’s follower. Such a stylistic lineage begins when some major artist, after spending his early years copying and leatning, gives the inherited lineage “one turn” (yibian), sending it off in a different direction and “establishing his own house” (gicbeng yd), what English speakers would call founding a school. Followers of the master would then carry on this tradition with more or less fidelity of indi- vidual contribution. ‘The further the remove from the original master, the more the style tends to slip into a mannerist hardness and to lose in naturalism, because the successive generations of followers are imitating learned forms instead of depicting visual forms of nature. This pattern is typical of the traditional masters and schools of the eatly period but applies in some degree to later artists and schools as well. On the whole, however, post-Song painters and those who write about them put more stress ‘on individuality of style and brushwork, largely in te- sponse to the growing dominance of the doctrines of literati painting, a dominance that operates even when the artists in question do not properly belong to the literati class. ‘Another kind of classification used by Chinese writers on painting, this one horizontal rather than vertical, syn- chronic rather than diachronic, is the identification of lo- cal or regional schools. Some of the schools are specific to cities—the Wu (Suzhou) School in the Ming, the Nanjing School in the early Qing, Others ate regional, such as the Anhui School in the early Qing, which was not located in any particular city and can even be seen as extending beyond the boundaries of Anhui Province proper. The Zhe School in the Ming is even less definable ‘geographically —it is named after the homeplace of the artist credited as its founder, Dai Jin, but the painters associated with it come from a diversity of centers. It is easy enough to dismiss such groupings as ill defined or even meaningless; but these formulations, other formulations by the Chinese, have a teal basis in observed stylistic and art-historical phenomena and, properly understood, can be useful in orgznizing the be- wilderingly huge and diverse corpus of Chinese painting. The same is true of the numerical listings of artists which Chinese writers are also fond oft the Eight Masters of Jialing (Nanjing), che Four Masters of Xin’an (Anhui), the ight Eccentries of Yangzhou, and the like. Again, these ate easy to criticize—those who do so point out that the artists included did not all know each other ‘or did not all come from Yangzhou and that different writers do not include the same artists in their lists. The lists are primarily mnemonic devices; once memorized, they allow one to recall who were the most prominent painters active in mid-seventeenth-century Nanjing or cighteenth-century Yangzhou. As such, they are useful, provided one does not misunderstand the “schoo!” ( pai) to be, like some schools in modern European painting, fn association formed by the artists themselves with an agreed-on aesthetic and stylistic basis. ‘Many of the matters touched on in this introduction, will be reintroduced in the chapters that follow, in refer- ke most cence to particular periods, schools, artists, and paintings. But we can see from the discussion so far that there are some differences between traditional Chinese ap- proaches to painting and the concerns and methods that characterize foreign scholarship on the subject. The dif- ferences have diminished somewhat in recent years as Chinese and foreign scholars have had more opportuni ties for interaction and learning from each other, and will 0 doubt diminish still more in the future. But even though a proponent of any particular method or ap. proach on cither side may be prone to see itas the “best” ‘or “sight” approach (much as Dong Qichang could iden- tify a “right” or “orthodox” way to depict landscape), a diversity of viewpoints on such an inexhaustible set of problems is surely healthy, and we should not aim at any grand synthesis or overriding homogeneity of scholarly Approaches to Chinese Paintingmethods. The present book has the advantage of includ- ing sections that reflect the special ways Chinese and non-Chinese scholars write about art and construct their histories of it, besides reflecting the approaches and styles of the six authors individually. Because of the spe- cial high-level US-China cooperation that brought it into being, we authors are also privileged to introduce a great many works in Chinese collections to foreign readers for whom they will be mostly unfamiliar and in some cases exciting. I hope that this auspicious begin- ning will be followed by many more cooperative projects of this kind. an total